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Abstract
The Knitting and Crochet Guild archive, Holmfirth, west yorkshire hosts a vast array of handmade items, including clothing, artifacts, yarns, and samples, as well as tools, pattern leaflets, booklets, and magazines. this article explores how the collection was used as a starting point for engaging students in new experiential encounters with the archive, as both a concept and as a container for material histories of the past. two theoretical frameworks of investigation provide an intertwining methodology for reading the project: the first operates as a feminist narrative of intervention in the history of textile craft making, and the second considers how the “thought-images” of walter benjamin provide a tool for thinking through student responses. it is argued that as a repository of the home crafts, lee mills provides historical materialism with the experiential investigation it needs for a critical pedagogy of the present.